8,000 Miles, 96 Hours, 3 Dead Pirates: Inside a Navy SEAL Rescue

The guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge tows the lifeboat from the Maersk Alabama to the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer on April 13, 2009. Photo: U.S. Navy

On April 8, 2009, four pirates armed with AK-47s clambered up the side of the U.S.-flagged container ship Maersk Alabama, sailing off the coast of Somalia. But after a brief scuffle with some of the 20 crewmembers, the pirates opted to abandon the 508-foot long ship, sailing off in one of its motorized lifeboats. They may not have captured the Maersk Alabama, nor looted its millions of dollars’ worth of food and humanitarian aid bound for Kenya, but they didn’t leave empty handed. The pirates had a captive: Maersk Alabama‘s captain, Richard Phillips.

Four days later, three of the four pirates were dead — each from a single .30-caliber rifle bullet to his brain, courtesy of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six. The fourth pirate, just 16 years old, was in Navy custody. And Phillips was on his way home, unharmed but for the psychological strain from four days in captivity in a sweltering lifeboat, unsure whether he would live or die.

The precision killing of the three pirates by six members of SEAL Team Six, the same unit that would later kill Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout, has rarely been described in detail. Retired Rear Adm. Terry McKnight, who commanded U.S. naval forces off Somalia during the Maersk Alabama standoff, devotes 45 pages of his new book Pirate Alley to the people, methods, equipment and even politics behind Phillips’ daring rescue.

McKnight’s book, published by the Naval Institute Press, shines new light on the SEALs’ role — and, by extension, the rarely mentioned skills the secretive and lethal warriors bring to bear on battlefields across the globe. To be fair, some of these details are mentioned in passing in No Easy Day, the controversial memoir by former SEAL Matt Bissonnette that was published last month. But McKnight’s book also reveals new information about the vital role that intelligence specialists — and particularly a Somali interpreter — played in the raid.

The Maersk Alabama, as seen from a Navy patrol plane the day she was attacked. Photo: Navy

From January to early April 2009, McKnight commander Combined Task Force 151, a rotating mix of a dozen or so warships from the U.S. Navy and its European and Asian allies that patrols more than a million square miles of the Indian Ocean, stretching from Kenya to the Persian Gulf and east to west from Somalia to India. Since the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, sea banditry has steadily risen, with impoverished former fishermen and hardened criminals alike arming themselves with guns and rockets and taking to the sea in captured trawlers and fiberglass boats called “skiffs.” In 2008, Somali pirates hijacked 44 large commercial ships, an increase from 12 the previous year. The average ransom rose from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions.

Piracy was an old problem by the time McKnight took command of his task force. But the attempted hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and the kidnapping of Phillips were new. The Maersk Alabama was the first U.S.-flagged ship — that is, an American-owned vessel registered in the U.S. and subject to U.S. laws and protection — had been boarded by pirates for two centuries.

McKnight had stepped down as CTF-151 commander just three days before the Maersk Alabama incident, so he did not directly participate in the U.S. response. But with his high-level relationships, intimacy with counter-piracy methods and many inside sources, his account of the pirate-takedown is the most detailed yet.

CTF-151’s destroyer USS Bainbridge was the first to respond to the maydays from Maersk Alabama, which bobbed near the pirates — and Phillips — in the stolen lifeboat, preventing it from escaping to land. The 9,200-ton Bainbridge had swapped its helicopters and pilots for a catapult-launched Boeing ScanEagle drone plus the robot’s operators. It also had a beefed-up intelligence team that included one of the Navy’s few, and prized, Somali interpreters. While technically part of CTF-151, the Bainbridge had her own unique missions. “I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that the mission had something to do with supporting U.S. Special Ops forces in Somalia,” McKnight writes.

Under the command of Cmdr. Frank Castellano, Bainbridge raced toward the Maersk Alabama at top speed. In the day it took the destroyer to reach the scene of the attempted hijacking, the crew began synthesizing intelligence from multiple sources, including the ScanEagle, an orbiting Navy patrol plane and reports from Maersk Alabama‘s crew. According to McKnight, the interpreter added a dash of local knowledge, including the fact that pirates often chew narcotic khat leaves to ward off seasickness. In this case, “it turned out the pirates had run out of khat,” McKnight writes.

The pirates were already on edge when Bainbridge reached the lifeboat on the night of April 9, freeing the Maersk Alabama to continue to Kenya. The destroyer “lit up the place” with spotlights, sirens and loudspeakers. “They were pissed,” Castellano said of the pirates, according to McKnight. The bandits threatened to kill Phillips. In fact, they really just wanted to reach shore and ransom the merchant captain, McKnight writes. But if they could escape the American navy, the pirates seemed willing to die, according to the retired admiral.

Three more U.S. warships were on their way, but Castellano realized he needed more specialized help. “I don’t have sniper rifles on the ship,” he recalled in an interview with McKnight. According to McKnight, the Bainbridge skipper specifically requested Navy SEALs. Perhaps Castellano was familiar with the naval commandos’ skillset, having spent part of his deployment supporting them with his drone. More or less simultaneously, the White House determined that SEAL Team Six was the best force to handle Phillips’ rescue.

But those SEALs were based 8,000 miles away in Virginia. So in the meantime, another group of SEALs “working in the Horn of Africa” deployed to the warships. “This group would keep the situation at bay until the Team Six operators dispatched from the United States came in,” McKnight writes.

A Navy SEAL with his .30-caliber sniper rifle. Photo: Navy

According to McKnight, on April 10 six Team Six SEALs flew from Oceana, Virginia, direct to the Somalia coast. Their Air Force C-17 cargo plane refueled in the air no fewer than three times during the 16-hour flight. “SEALs are understandably concerned about stealth,” McKnight writes. “That tells me that the operation was planned so that they would parachute into the ocean under cover of darkness, probably a high-altitude low-opening jump so that the pirates weren’t alerted.”

McKnight cites the log book from the frigate USS Halyburton, recently arrived alongside Bainbridge. The log mentions six SEALs embarking the ship at 2:30 in the morning on April 11, then transferring via small boat to Bainbridge. McKnight says the SEALs brought their own sniper rifles, described elsewhere as .30-caliber SR-25s.

At 4:45 that afternoon, President Barack Obama, who had just been in office for three months, authorized the use of lethal force in Phillips’ rescue. Minutes later, the pirates radioed Castellano’s interpreter, announcing they were going to start the lifeboat’s engine and “make it to shore, no matter what,” according to McKnight. On his interpreter’s advice, Castellano informed the pirates that they had drifted 80 miles from their own clan’s territory. The pirates would need to negotiate with the elders of a rival clan in order to even consider going ashore. Castellano proposed that meeting take place at sea. The pirates agreed.

Later, they also agreed to let Bainbridge take the lifeboat under tow, ostensibly to keep the boat stable as the weather worsened. Sailors hooked a cable to the lifeboat and the destroyer slowly, imperceptibly, began winching the boat closer and closer to itself, until it was just 25 meters away. The SEALs were apparently already lying prone on Bainbridge‘s flight deck, scanning the lifeboat with the crosshairs of their sniper rifles.

Phillips’ lifeboat, as seen by Bainbridge’s ScanEagle drone. Photo: Navy

In McKnight’s telling, the tension ratcheted up the next morning, April 12. One of the pirates, only 16 years old, had been injured battling the Maersk Alabama‘s crew. He asked to go aboard Bainbridge for medical help, effectively giving himself up to the Americans. At the same time, another pirate radioed that Phillips needed to see a doctor. A Navy corpsman motored over to the lifeboat with a change of clothes for the kidnapped captain: blue pants and a bright yellow shirt. “Captain Phillips didn’t figure it out right then, but there were people aboard Bainbridge who wanted to make sure the he more or less glowed in the dark,” McKnight writes.

Stressed near the breaking point, on the night of April 12 Phillips wrestled with his captors in a failed escape attempt. In the scuffle, a pirate fired his rifle into the sea. That was enough for the SEALs. The next time all three remaining pirates showed their heads, three SEAL snipers fired one shot each. “Each of the three pirates was struck in the head, a deliberate shot that is used to kill a target while making sure that he doesn’t have an involuntary muscle response and pull the trigger on the automatic weapon in his hand,” McKnight writes.

“BAINBRIDGE RETURNED FIRE,” is all the destroyer’s log book said, according to the admiral.

Phillips’ captors were dead; the captain was free. A pirate standoff that could have ended in disaster instead resolved itself without any American blood shed — thanks in large part to a small team of far-flying, night-parachuting, sharpshooting Navy commandos, with an assist from a Somali linguist. And their exploits off the Somali coast would remain relatively obscure, if not for McKnight’s revealing book.